Ceramic-polymer hybrid materials have great potential for applications in a wide variety of fields, including membranes, high performance filtration, chemical sensing, biomedical engineering, renewable energy, batteries, membranes for Li-ion battery separators, capacitors, electrodes, solar cell applications, piezoelectrics, dielectric materials, macro- and micro-electronic materials, textiles, smart fibers, porous films, catalysts, absorbers, absorbers, membranes for filtration of materials such as pollutants, sensors, fabrics, smart fabrics, porous low-k dielectrics and other materials for the electronics and microelectronic industries and/or tissue regeneration matrices.
The process development of morphology-controlled ceramic-polymer hybrids, however, has been hindered by the difficulty associated with requiring high temperature calcination to form ceramics from ceramic precursors. Temperatures of calcination for useful ceramic materials can range from 350° C. to over 1000° C. Very few organic polymer materials can withstand these high temperatures so that the choice of ceramic-polymer hybrid materials is extremely limited thus limiting the usefulness of these types of materials. The technique is also limiting in the use of other ingredients such as metals, alloys, carbonaceous materials and the like, as metals can oxidize at the high calcination temperatures. Additionally in those cases where calcination is useful the temperature of calcination needs to be ramped from 0.1 degree per minute to 20 degrees per minute and the time to calcinate many of the materials can be as much as 5 hours to a number of days.
Some methods of creating structured materials (such as nanofibers) include drawing, template synthesis, phase separation, self-assembly and electrospinning. The drawing method can make one-by-one single structures. However, only a highly viscoelastic material that can undergo the strong deformations created while being cohesive enough to support the stresses developed during pulling can be made into elongated structures through drawing. The template process is hampered in that it cannot make one-by-one continuous nanostructures. The phase separation process consists of a series of elaborated processes including dissolution, gelation, extraction using a different solvent, freezing, and drying resulting in a nanoscale porous foam. The process takes a long period of time to transfer the solid polymer into the nano-porous foam. The self-assembly is a process in which individual, pre-existing components organize themselves into desired patterns and functions. However, similarly to the phase separation the self-assembly is time-consuming in processing continuous polymer materials.
Alternate methods prepare ceramic-polymer hybrid materials that contain pores, fill the pores with polymer precursors and allow the precursors to polymerize by a number of typical polymerization methods, the ceramic material being pre-formed. In these cases the filling of the pores can be inefficient and the polymerization of the polymer precursors confined within the space may only be partial.
Alternate methods of preparing ceramic-polymer hybrid materials are also limited by the solubility of the ceramic material in a suitable solvent. In some cases colloidal solutions are used to disperse the ceramic materials, but the amount of the ceramic component in the resulting hybrid materials are subsequently limited. The ceramic-polymer hybrid materials prepared alternate methods also suffer from lack of homogeneity (uniform distribution) in that the ceramic materials and polymer materials generally are not compatible and do not mix well.